What is confidence really?
Recently, I spoke to a blogger friend of mine who is new to the whole blogging thing. She told me that she feels insecure and unsure of what she is doing.
She also told me that she admires me and other bloggers. “You guys always look so confident in whatever you post on social media. And you consistently post on your websites.”
My mind thought: if you only knew… I have been slacking the writing on my blog, not wanting to force my creativity, because I’ve had a lot of other things on my mind and there have been things happening in my life that is keeping me busy.
Behind the scenes, I’m also sometimes fearful of my next blog post.
I’ve found myself thinking: what if the next post is not good enough? What if I never have any posts that people can learn from or enjoy reading?
I told my husband recently that I have not started writing my book because I fear that I won’t have a good ending for it. The idea of the book sounds good, but where will the story end?
These thoughts hey.
But, I realise it’s normal. Confidence comes in doing. When you fear about what will happen before you even do something, just start taking action. Fear will always be there.
Seriously, we (creatives) are also very critical of our work. In a few interviews on Real Talk with Anele (a talk show on SABC3), actors confess that they always look at themselves on the screen and think: “I could’ve done this scene in a different way.”
Whether you’re young in the game or a seasoned professional, fears will always come up. The thing is that despite all of this, you should just take action, just do. Confidence comes the more you do it because you’ll become better at the actions.
What do you think – how do you build your confidence or stay confident?
For me, I feel insecure when I am focusing on myself too much. When I focus on the message I want to share, or others who I can help, then I am able to be productive with my creativity.
confidence is a hard one to learn! I hope to instill it on my son from the beginning.
I’ve found that as I get older I naturally gain more confidence. It’s not that I’m confident all the time, but I’m definitely more secure in who I am, and when I see my confidence wavering I always try to remind myself of that.
“confidence comes in doing” … i like how you put it. thanks for the encouragement.
thank you for this insightful post. I agree with the previous commentator that confidence comes from doing. Just go and do it. No one knows what the hell they doing, they learn and improve as they do. Just be authentic as you are. i have recently decided to change my career path and its extremely stressful as I have 10 years experience in one thing and zero in the new thing. but i have to ‘lean in’ to my decision and rather expand myself than do something that does not energise me.
So true. Like a baby learning to walk, we wobble at first then in the end we run!